Commentary
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) began on Feb. 24 in a suddenly changed world.
While in not-so-distant times, we might have called it “Red Star Over CPAC”—now, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is not only taking over Ukraine, but also CPAC, where the key morning panel featuring China expert Gordon Chang and foreign policy specialist K.T. McFarland was grim indeed, with McFarland stating that we are in the gravest crisis since World War II.
Everyone acknowledged that this is far bigger than just Ukraine—Russia clearly wants the old Soviet Union back, maybe even more than that, including the demolition of NATO.
The question of the hour was: Is the West ready to fight back with more than meaningless sanctions? Putin obviously didn’t think so. Why would he? And it wasn’t just the debacle in Afghanistan. The very moral fiber of the West seems to have disappeared.
Wrapped up in COVID hysteria and driven apart by what now seem even more like idiotic questions of identity, skin color, and gender, the democracies of the world are in a weak position indeed. And that’s before Xi Jinping invades Taiwan, a specter very much on the horizon as the Chinese regime draws closer to Russia and refuses to criticize the Ukraine invasion.
Much as I hate to admit it, even Donald Trump’s claims of “good relations” with Xi and Putin seem pallid at the moment. Fear of President Trump was a different matter.
But there is hope. If you remember World War II history, you recall how dark things looked for democracy in the beginning. It took several years to get our forces together.
Here at CPAC, I took my own informal poll of younger attendees, those who might normally be of draft age or near, and asked the operative question: If Russia moved on Eastern Europe, on Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary and so forth, would they fight?
Uniformly, these young men said they would. Of course, this is a subset of a subset—researchers for Peter Schweizer, a couple already in the military, and two Dartmouth students sitting next to me as I type who write for the conservative Dartmouth Review.
Nevertheless, I get the sense—maybe, it’s just a hope—that our younger generation is better than we think they are.
I am not a neo-con writing this. I don’t want to rush into war and get people killed for no reason, nor have I heard or talked to anyone at CPAC who does.
Still, we must be realists and keep our eyes open, then act accordingly without fear. In her panel, McFarland spoke in terms of good and evil, and that we must recognize that there’s evil in the world. To succeed, however, we must also realize who our enemies are.
If it’s a free democratic republic that we love, our government agencies must start behaving like one—in the words of Nat King Cole, “straighten up and fly right.”
In a new substack post, the lawyer who goes by the online moniker Techno Fog writes, “The unstated scandal: The CIA collected info on President Trump.” Evidently, they should have been collecting more info on our enemies. As the old song goes, “Which Side Are You On?”
According to pollster Jim McLaughlin, who is speaking as I type this, his most recent survey says that the dominant group in the coming election won’t be Republicans, Democrats, or even independents. It will be those who identify as conservatives.
In other words, what’s called in our constitution “The People.”
I wish I could then say “CPAC 1, Putin 0.” But that story is yet to be written.
I should add the first standing ovation of the day went to James O’Keefe of Project Veritas. Deserved.
